Corruption / Corrupted player game play

Bored2Death

Hello wonderful people I've had a thought.

Corruption has the potential to be an amazing system that completely changes the way player interactions work on a large scale. Currently from what I've seen which is very little, corruption has been presented as just a punishment system in PvP and "the bad" placeholder.

It certainly will fulfill that role as it's been presented, but in my opinion, will be a huge missed opportunity in terms of game play novelty and creating a better atmosphere.

A more interesting system would be if more corrupted players had interactions and quests in the corrupted zones with the objective of spreading/fortifying the corruption. Players that deepened their corruption would advance a corrupted tree that would allow for them to do things like disguise their corrupted player status or forge documents spoofing their citizenship. The corruption could also give players cursed items to hide that could do things like AoE proximity based debuffs or spawn corrupted npcs to attack players/structures in the area.

Players could be given tasks like, but not limited to, creating and selling disguised corrupted consumables / trade goods made from corrupted materials or non-combatant players at a player hub. This could result in things like multi day debuffs for people who consumed them or turning hub NPCs into zombies. Perhaps faulty or sabotaged materials for crafting could be sold to hubs, which for every unit of corrupted materials used in building crafting it would add a % chance for the structural integrity to fail.

A system like this does a number of immensely beneficial things in terms of facilitating the atmosphere the Intrepid studio seems to want to create. Firstly by allowing corrupted players to have negative impacts via the crafting and trading systems you establish the importance of trust and secure supply / trade routes. Will you trust that trench coated Shadowlord that sold you those potions?

It creates opportunities for much more intricate political situations. Lower tier hubs like villages might have to deal with sabotage and infiltration from the corrupted and would put value on players who are able to find them out and put a natural counter pressure on leading hubs gobbling up massive chunks of the a server's player pop if they begin to outperform the rest. A natural game play route is created for players who want to fulfill the villain role adding a dynamic element to the antagonistic force.

Furthermore, I believe a lot of what would be considered toxic pvp behavior would be prevented by having more immersive / beneficial ways for players to express negative energy. Rather than being the annoying troll who spams the global chat or ganks low level players for days, that solo player might be able to play an excellent villain if given the tools by the developers. As a studio pushing for innovation in a long stagnant genre having a unique player - AI coalition as your antagonistic force would be a step towards how mmorpgs will operate in the future.

I'm curious what other people think!

Asgerr

While all these are cool ideas, they go against the goal of the corruption system.

If you give all these cool options to players if they go corrupt, you're essentially defeating the purpose of it being a deterrent against ganking.

So if these were to be implemented, I would not tie it to the corruption system per se. I would rather allocate them under social organisation quest lines and rewards. Things like the Thieves' guild, or certain religions and religious organisations etc.